For a moment Darcy could not say anything when he stepped into the room and saw Elizabeth smilingly seated up, her hair lit like a halo by the last rays of the dying sunlight.
His breath caught, and she looked at him and smiled, and there was something in her eyes that made Darcy think that Elizabeth knew how he saw her when he looked at her, and that she liked it.
He swallowed, and he walked forward.
She stretched her delicate hands out to him. "Mr. Darcy. I must thank you again, and again, and again."
Her voice was rough and had a nasal burr. But it was also strong.
"No thanks. No thanks are needed." Darcy took and kissed her hand and then pulled the chair that he'd been sitting in to care for her close again and looked at her closely.
She looked clean and neat now, and the scent of sickness that had been in the room for the past days only lingered at the edges.
"You had Becky to dress me, and not in my own clothes. I at least must thank you for that." Elizabeth winked at the maid. "I should not say this in front of her, but she is quite capable and determined."
The lady's maid blushed when Darcy looked at her and looked down and mumbled something.
Elizabeth laughed and that sound made Darcy's heart soar. "I forget that we are only to speak freely with each other when the master is not present. Propriety and decorum in front of the servants."
Darcy peered at Elizabeth carefully and studied her. She was pale now rather than flushed. But while she looked somewhat thinner than she had when she arrived before her fever, there was a clearness to her skin that was different from the dried, almost parchment tone of her skin in the depths of her illness.
The fear that had entered his heart the moment he saw her collapse in a faint in his drawing room now at last left.
Elizabeth, he hoped, would not too long from now be recovered fully in health.
"Becky, I must have a few words with Mrs. Benoit alone. Might you stand in the corridor, and I will leave the door unlocked, enter again in two minutes, and I think that shall be enough to ensure some propriety is observed."
"Yes, sir." The woman bobbed her head and stepped outside.
The room was overly warm; the fire had been kept high to ensure the invalid was not bothered with a draft from the window.
Darcy could not keep from remembering how he'd kept company with Elizabeth during her thrashing fever. He stared for a moment at her hand, lying white and small on the coverlet. He wanted to grip it again, like he'd dared to when she'd called his name during her illness.
But now she was not in a dream, and he now was well rested, not with his judgement and sense of normality drained by two nights of fear and waiting for the doctor, and hanging on every change of Elizabeth's breathing or complexion to determine how she fared.
This was now a normal evening in a normal room where he was attending a gentlewoman who he respected in the highest way a man could respect a woman. He must behave himself.
"The news. I presume they hunt me for his murder."
"Lord Lachglass is not dead, nor permanently injured beyond a scar on his forehead and the likelihood that his nose will heal bent."
Elizabeth's eyes wavered from side to side, and her head tilted confusedly, as though the notion of him yet living completely shocked her. "But… I know I could not tell… but I had convinced myself."
Darcy touched her soft arm covered by the pretty yellow wool dress Becky had adjusted to fit her. "Does it disappoint you to not be a murderess?"
"A little, perhaps?" She laughed weakly, but shook her head. "Alive. And Mr. Blight?"
"A bribed servant claims he walks around with a bandage around his face, and has eaten only soup for the past days, but otherwise is well."
Elizabeth nibbled adorably on one of her knuckles. "Truly, so easily resolved. Not dead. Almost as though all was a bad dream."
"No." Darcy shook his head. "I am afraid matters are not over yet. He wants revenge. He has men throughout the city asking for you. I sent a letter to your aunt and uncle through means that I am certain cannot be tracked that you were with friends, to relieve their worry, once I learned that Lord Lachglass was yet alive. But until you are healthy, I think we should refrain from going to them."
"What can he do to me at this point?"
Darcy could imagine many things a vengeful and vicious man could do to Elizabeth. At present he had asked his man of business to hire his own investigators to look into Lord Lachglass's affairs, political, business and otherwise. There were enough rumors around Lord Lechery that it would not surprise Darcy at all if he could shake from the trees some proof of serious wrong action to hang over the aristocrat's head, even if Darcy understood the privileges of titled gentlemen well enough to know that he would never see Lachglass hung, as he ought to be.
Or have his head chopped off if he insisted, as he no doubt would, on the aristocratic right to not be executed like a commoner. Darcy's thirst for vengeance upon the man who imposed himself on Elizabeth would be satisfied by a chopped off head entirely as well as by a hanging.
Darcy feared what Lord Lachglass might attempt to do to Elizabeth if he knew where she was.
She still waited for a reply, and he did not want to scare her with the imaginations that haunted his mind: Assassins, frivolous accusations, kidnapping — especially kidnapping.
Darcy shrugged. "I do not know, but I would prefer not to find out before his temper has had a chance to cool."
"I still want to add to your note to my Aunt and Uncle one of my own."
Becky knocked on the door, and Darcy called for her to come in.
With a bob of her head, the servant walked to the far side of the room and pulled a dainty chair next to the window, so they could pretend she could not hear their conversation if they spoke quietly. She settled on her lap some blue piece work, and with a barely audible clicking of her needles against each other, she became, for Darcy at least, almost part of the furniture.
Except he was very aware that she still had ears.
"Ah, Mrs. Benoit," Darcy began, unsure and awkward suddenly, and needing to use the false name to both remind himself not to call her either Miss Bennet, or his dear, sweet, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth laughed, "I confessed only a half hour past to Becky there that I have no memory of my marriage — now do not feel you need to answer a word, Becky. I know how stern Mr. Darcy is. I'd not break propriety in the slightest if I served him, which fortunately I do not."
"You do not want to serve me?" Darcy replied, with an amused voice.
"No, not at all. I have had enough of service for a life. And if it comes to it, that I shall enter service again, I like you far too much to lose the right to tweak your nose — as a metaphor — whenever the urge comes to take me."
Darcy grinned, and he replied with his straightest face, "I am much too respectable a gentleman for my nose to ever be tweaked."
"A pity." Mirth played around the edge of her pale lips. "I do dearly love to tweak noses." Then she flushed. "Ah, I have perhaps done enough business with noses of late though."
Darcy winced. "So I have heard. But precisely how did you cause that…" He glanced again at Becky. It really was inconvenient both maintaining propriety and not speaking anything in front of the servants. He did trust Becky, and he wanted to find a place for the woman in his house, as it was the proper thing to do for the daughter of a woman his mother had remembered in her will.
He would not have placed her in the position of being in charge of Elizabeth's care if he had not trusted her, and known who her people were. And for that matter, they had both known each other as children, though the separation between a gentleman and a person from the lower orders had already been there.
Despite that, discretion in front of servants had been drilled into Darcy's mind by his father and mother. It was always a simple notion: Never trust one who must earn a day's wage with information of true importance. There were ample stories of men betrayed in some important way by a servant. Mr. Darcy always maintained a distant but courteous manner with his servants, even maintaining his dignity around those such as Mrs. Reynolds who had helped to raise him as a child, and who was related to the family.
Elizabeth's convivial manner with Becky felt strange to Darcy to watch. Once he would have seen it as a sign of her poor breeding — in a way he still thought that, but the insult was now turned around and pointed towards himself: Elizabeth did not have an overly rarified breeding and an overly refined sense of her own self-importance.
Both features of Elizabeth that showed her superiority.
"Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth said archly, "we must have some conversation. Only a little may do — you were quite verbose when it was only the two of us. As for what I did to the nose of that personification of at least two of the seven sins — though he certainly does not personify sloth, so he cannot manage for all seven — I used my head, like every clever and sensible young woman ought."
"So that's how your forehead was bruised." Darcy unconsciously and unstoppably brushed his fingers over where the remaining hint of damaged skin had been disguised by an excellent application of some cream by Becky. The covering made the tone of the skin on her bruised forehead nearly match the rest of her skin.
Darcy blushed and drew away his hand. He looked at Becky again, who studiously studied her knitting. The needles clicked against each other.
It appeared he did need a chaperone, and not only to maintain a thin pretense of Elizabeth's respectability.
"That's where that big bruise came from," Elizabeth agreed cheerfully. "Cracked him hard, though that was not enough to put him down."
"Every sensible girl should use her head? I do not think that is what was meant." Darcy looked admiringly at her smiling face.
"I have been so afeard of hanging. I dreamed about it," Elizabeth said, "but now—"
"Do not say anything on that matter."
"I am so glad he is alive."
Darcy lowered his voice, so that he was almost sure Becky could not hear him, and leaned close to Elizabeth and said in a soft whisper, "You did nothing wrong. Even if you had killed him, you would have done nothing wrong."
"I do not know what to feel. I nearly died. He did not hurt me more than the bruise from a slap. The damage to my forehead I do not place at his account, for when I chose to crush his nose with my head I can hardly object to receiving a far milder injury. I did nearly die, and the experience of walking across the cold of London in a pair of house slippers on a sleety day, twice, is not one I shall forget soon. Nor that I would care to repeat. But…"
Elizabeth trailed off. Her mouth was screwed into a small frown.
Darcy worried what she may be thinking. Richard once told him that after the sack of a town, women who were raped often felt deeply stained and shamed by what had happened to them, and that even women who had been simply handled roughly by men, but who escaped worse fate, felt likewise.
And then Elizabeth smiled, brilliantly. "I am exceeding proud. Proud of myself in a way I cannot recall ever being before. Exceeding proud. And I would be prouder yet if I'd killed him, though the consequence of that must make me grateful that I did not. To make an allusion to the ancients, I feel as an Amazon must have upon capturing a shepherd to serve as her supposedly unwilling mate. I have beaten the unfair sex at their own game, and though it may be unfeminine of me to exult in having achieved some success at brute violence, I exult in it. This awareness that I can triumph, and that I can use my body to make a gentleman, a peer of the realm, to hurt is part of me now, and I am happy it is."
"My sweet warrior woman friend. I salute you then," Darcy grinned, "and I am happy for your Amazonian traits."
"Yes, well, I shall endeavor next time I am in a ballroom to hide those Amazonian traits. I hope I still can fill a dress with my female traits," Elizabeth spoke in a sly voice that made Darcy both laugh and flush, "And in truth, I would much prefer to be underestimated than overestimated. If he'd known that I had some reckoning how to fight, I doubt I could have mauled Lechery so easily or efficiently. And certainly not Mr. Blight as well."
Darcy was quite sure, as he was unable to keep from glancing down to admire her female features, well displayed by the light day dress of Georgiana's Becky had somehow fitted her in, that no one would mistake Elizabeth Bennet for a burly Amazon warrior.
"I shall never underestimate you," Darcy spoke low, looking into her eyes, "Not again, for you once have given me a drubbing."
Now was Elizabeth's turn to turn away and flush, hiding her red cheek against a plump pillow. "Have I really? I hope you did not hurt so much as I hope Lord Lechery hurts from his smashed nose."
"I confess, your words stung, and stung deep. But they stung because they had truth behind them."
"I hope, you know," Elizabeth replied, "that I have long since ceased to give much credence to any objection I held against you at the time."
Darcy smiled wryly. "I hope you have not entirely, for that would waste the effort I have put forward upon how to amend myself in accord with your reproofs. You said, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. I confess that notion, that I had not behaved in a gentlemanlike manner, has stuck in my head all these years."
"Dear me!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "I certainly had no notion of affecting you so deeply."
"I should imagine not, you thought me lacking in every proper consideration then, and—"
"I certainly did not. And now I know what a man lacking in every proper consideration is like."
They smiled at each other.
Darcy felt in his heart that it would be entirely impossible, and deeply disreputable for him, to push any attention Elizabeth did not explicitly, and unprompted ask for upon her at this time. She was a refugee under his roof. However, he yet loved her, and the passage of four years had done nothing to the love he held for her, and further he thought, that beyond the gratefulness she had for his rescue of her, there was something in her that was awakening to him, and that she responded to his unchanged — no his grown — affection for her, with an affection of her own.
"I do not," Darcy added reflectively, "consider it a bad matter that those words were nailed into my mind. Rather the opposite. You gave me the impetus to become a better man, a man who might become worthy of the affections of a woman who is worthy of admiration — I do not say I have succeeded entirely, for I do yet have great pride, but I always seek to be honestly concerned in the wellbeing of those around me, I always seek to treat those beneath me in a courteous manner, and I ask myself how I would wish to be treated if I was in such a condition and state as they, and I make that a guide to my actions. Further, I have made an effort to not stick my nose in business where it does not belong, though that I confess has in some ways been harder and less rewarding than my attempt to be more courteous."
"You mean to avoid such behavior as what you showed towards Bingley?"
"Aye. I talked with him about the matter, a year or two ago, and he confessed it had been a full year before he ceased to compare every woman to Miss Bennet. I parted a couple with a full potential for happiness. I hope Miss Bennet has not suffered greatly — has she married?"
"She has, to a poor vicar, but she is very happy with him." Elizabeth smiled softly, her eyes dreamy. "I do like him very much. I confess he looks a little like Bingley, and has similar manners. And he is loved greatly by everyone in the parish. They have no great store of money, and should the marriage be particularly fruitful it will be a struggle to see the children all settled respectably, but there is a deep contentment in both of them. And I should not overstate their difficulties in matters of money; they have a maid of all work, and a comfortable parsonage. They do rather better than most persons."
"And your other sisters?"
"Ah, Lydia — for a kindness her fate turned out not so bad as we feared. Did you ever hear that she ran off, believing she would marry another gentleman lacking in every respectable feeling of our acquaintance?"
"Good God. Mr. Wickham — you do refer to Mr. Wickham?"
"I do."
"I have some guilt in that, for not having denounced him for what he was."
"Nonsense, the blame rests entirely with two people, and you are neither of them."
"What happened — I cannot believe he married her. How was it not so bad?"
"She married in the end, someone else." Elizabeth frowned at the coverlet covering her lap and paused with a sad look in her eyes. Carriage wheels passed along the square outside. "I remember how Papa looked when he came back from searching for her. I miss him very much, you know."
"I still miss my papa as well."
Elizabeth stretched forward her hand and gripped Darcy's. Her fingers were strong despite her illness, and he thought she wished to comfort them both for the loss of a good parent.
"Lydia's elopement seemed at the time the worst fate we could imagine. The trip that year I took with my uncle to the Lakes was interrupted just as we reached so far north by the news of it. Jane at first believed they would marry. But with the name of the man she had run off, supposedly towards Scotland with in the letter… I knew in an instant the disaster was certain."
"Mr. Wickham," Darcy stated flatly.
"A single name, all therein described."
"I would I allowed my cousin to run him through after he—"
Darcy glanced at Becky, who stood up as the sun was setting and quickly bustled around lighting a half dozen candles before returning to her knitting.
"Colonel Fitzwilliam?" Elizabeth asked.
"General Fitzwilliam now, but yes. He wanted to."
Elizabeth laughed, her dark eyes dancing in the light from the candles that had been set out as the sunset progressed. "I remember his manner, a charming and personable gentleman. I liked him very much, but he had that manner about him, the sort of man who you would not be surprised in the slightest to hear that he shot a man's brains through in a duel where the right was entirely on his side."
"Mr. Wickham was far too frightened of General Fitzwilliam to face him in a fair duel on any account. And rightly too. My cousin is a capable man."
"And a general now. Employed, I must imagine."
"He leads one of the divisions of the occupying army in France near Cambrai. Though he is in London at present as they are gathering the second battalion of his regiment."
"I would wish to hello him, but I fear that in all cases a secret kept to as few hands as possible is always superior."
"Yes." Darcy frowned. "Though if matters become dangerous, he is a capable man who may help us. I would have already spoken to him, if Lachglass was not his cousin on his mother's side."
Elizabeth stared down at her hands. Her hands clenched and gripped the soft red duvet and then she forced herself to relax the fist. "Things will not turn dangerous. He lives yet, and all other matters will clear up in a decent frame of time."
"Lydia, she was abandoned by Wickham?"
"Yes, or at least that is what I assume. When she did send letters to us again, following her marriage, she did not give any detailed account of that period of time."
"But you say she married?"
"Yes, to a young lieutenant, of no connections, but who had some bravery or talent, as he was raised to captain later following deaths on the battlefield. I do not know the details of the matter, and while Mama travelled to visit her, and see Lydia's child, this was after Papa died, and we did not have the resources to easily allow all of us to travel so far as to Newcastle, where they were at the time, even if just by stage."
"Not a good marriage, but respectable enough."
Darcy was decidedly happy to hear this. Not that he would have hesitated to marry Elizabeth if Lydia was the infamous mistress of an earl. But it was much preferable in his mind for her to be married, and to have the only difficulty associated with her to be that he would likely be someday asked to do something to help establish one of her children.
Elizabeth was silent. "Better, I think, than she deserved."
"Do you believe her to be happy?"
"She claims so. Mama was decidedly unhappy with how low she married, instead of being grateful simply that she did marry. That visit was before Waterloo, when he was yet a lieutenant, and an income much less than a hundred a year for a couple with a child."
"And a captain's salary is not so much that one can maintain a proper standard of life upon," Darcy agreed. "But perhaps the man is such that he will succeed over time in his profession."
"I am certain he has no connection to help him in his way, or money to purchase a higher commission."
Darcy hummed and shrugged. "Nothing particularly scandalous in that situation, much better than if her fate was entirely unknown, except that she likely lived as the mistress of some man of barely enough consequence to keep a mistress."
Elizabeth laughed. "I thought that to be her fate after it became clear to us that Mr. Wickham had abandoned her. Or worse. But yet… I do not think I can ever think highly of her."
Darcy could not disagree. "Yes, and I still ought to kill Wickham."
Elizabeth laughed. "Nay, nay. And Wickham, ill as I always have thought of him, late events make me think more kindly of him. I do not believe he had the character to be a rapist."
"To ruin and destroy the life of a silly young girl, solely to satisfy his own lusts and desire for pleasure. I do not know that there is a great deal of distance in wrongness."
"That," Elizabeth replied, "is because you are not a woman. A woman knows that a seductive rake may be a danger, and the objective damage he does may even be greater, but no matter how silly and uninformed she is, the woman has some scope of choice. But when choice is taken away. When violence is used…"
Elizabeth's voice trailed away, but she then smiled that brilliant, proud smile she had used earlier, when she talked about how she felt about successfully fighting off Lord Lechery. He thought she imagined again crushing his nose.
"Both men may be freely despised," Darcy insisted.
Elizabeth patted Darcy on the hand with her thin, still slightly fever-warm fingers. It sent shivers up his arm. "True." She yawned and blinked her eyes several times. "Absurd, but I am tired again, after just an hour awake."
"You were very ill. The physician, Mr. Goldman, was deeply worried, and he bled you several times."
Elizabeth yawned again. "I have never had so much sickness before. 'Twas not a pleasant experience."
"For me neither." Darcy stood up, and he hesitated for a moment, and then he briefly kissed Elizabeth upon her soft and warm forehead before he left her to her sleep.
When he glanced back at her before he closed the door to the room, her sweet eyes were closed and she had a large happy smile.